A Key Metric In Today’s Photo Production

‘Time-to-site’ is becoming an increasingly throttled target within eComm photo and video production. Brands need content to be produced and published faster and faster, without compromise of quality in order to stay ahead of the buying patterns of a fickle consumer base.

In a recent Glossy article, Fabletics Co-CEO Adam Goldenberg emphasized, “Speed is key to the next phase of growth as Fabletics looks to minimize its production window from a nine- to 12-week cycle down to a six- to eight-week cycle by early next year. A lot relies on newness, since customers come back each month and decide if they want to buy something or not.”

As reducing time-to-site becomes cemented in a top-down corporate strategy, creative teams must find ways to accelerate their visual production, hunting efficiencies and effective processes along the way. Here are two recommended strategies.

We’ve been there…production days on-set can feel like they stretch on forever – all you want to do is go home, but you still have to format, backup, and distribute all of the photos from the day’s shoot so that your team members can see the progress made that day. This distribution is sometimes the most focus-intensive as it represents the presentation of content to stakeholders (including clients and/or upper management). “Did we get everything we needed? Have I sent every required asset?” Fatigue at this stage can increase the potential of human errors which is unacceptable and, most importantly, can be avoided.

Get away from manual uploads and file reconciliation. Creative asset management platforms, like globaledit, can tether to capture stations and automatically upload content for access to other stakeholders in synch with your capture process. If you capture products by SKU or ‘look’, make sure your distribution platform is cloud-based, can mirror the folder structure into which you capture, and transfer any ratings or metadata captured on set. As a result, you don’t have to worry about uploading, sharing, and communicating progress. The moment you capture or process, it gets to the people who need to get their eyes on it, wherever they are. You can now use that time to complete other creative tasks.

Effectiveness: Improve collaboration strategies to the language of the medium

Disconnected, non-standardized communication through production slows things down and increases liability. Comment-based email or text messaging is probably one of the worst means of providing input to retouchers, yet it is still heavily utilized. You may have heard the phrase “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture”. The point is to use the nuances of the medium and stay in its space for true effectiveness. In the case of visual imagery, communicate notes visually. Text comments require subjective interpretation and lead to additional rounds of revisions that eat up valuable post-production timelines.

Find a creative asset management platform which provides a means of consolidating comments and callouts visually and records all user input over the history of the asset’s lifecyle, so when you look at an image you know exactly what needs to be done, who offered what feedback and when. Visual markups provide crystal clear direction and social media methodology such as ‘@mentions’ allow you to bring user attention to the asset, not the asset to the user.

CAM: Creative Asset Management Platforms

Hyper-sensitivity of ‘time-to-site’ has incentivized brands’ use and prioritization of CAM platforms, such as globaledit, to track and accelerate their photo and video production. There are a number of ways through which globaledit removes the manual, disconnected obstacles commonly found in creative production. If time-to-site matters to your brand, we can help. Fill out our contact us form and we’ll be in touch in less than an hour.